Nonobonanza
Fill in the squares the numbers describe and a picture turns up. Every one of them was proved solvable first.
Tell me when it lands Coming soon to iPhone and Android.Proved, not promised
Every drawing has exactly one solution, and you can think your way to it. You are never asked to guess, cross your fingers, and find out four rows later that you were wrong.
That is a test, not a sentence on a listing page. It runs over all five hundred of them on both platforms, and a build that fails it does not go anywhere. A puzzle that forces a guess is not a hard puzzle, it is one that feels broken, and being told afterwards that it was technically fair really does not help.
The board keeps the count
Fill or cross, and drag across a run rather than tapping it out square by square. Undo takes back the whole drag, because the drag is what you meant to do. Leave a puzzle to check the awards or take a call, and your marks are still waiting when you return.
A line whose numbers already add up crosses off its own leftovers. Counting the same row twice is nobody’s idea of an evening, and the app can already see the row is finished.
No timer, no lives, and no hint store. Puzzles reward tokens when solved, and tokens can reveal a stubborn square or check your mistakes when you are stuck. You earn help with your own thinking: you can never buy it with money.
The picture is the payout
Nothing tells you what you are drawing. The list gives a number and a size, an unsolved drawing keeps its silhouette to itself, and the name waits. The shape is the whole reward, and printing it next to the puzzle would be putting the punchline in the title.
Then it turns up. The grid, the crosses and the numbers fade out, the drawing slides across into the room the clues were holding, and stands there on its own with its name underneath. That is the entire ceremony, and it is plenty.
Everything you have drawn, kept
Solve one and it joins the gallery with its name on it. The gaps stay put and stay blank, because this is a record of what you have made and not a list of what you have not got round to.
Ink and Paper is a proper pair, not a filter dropped over one scheme. The dark half is the same idea printed on dark stock rather than the light half turned inside out, which is why a filled square goes light there. A dark mark on a dark ground is a beautiful idea and completely unreadable.
Awards that are moments
Every fifty drawings, something happens. Not a badge and not a coin: a small animation drawn on the same grid the puzzles are on, and a line of writing under it. It goes onto a wall you can play it back from whenever you like.
The line is the part that matters. It is never Achievement Unlocked. They are small kind things, written one at a time and meant, and they are the sort of sentence worth having in front of you on the evening you finish your two hundredth picture. Some keep a second line back, and that one arrives a word at a time if you press and hold.
Seven exist. The plan is one every fifty up to a thousand, which is twenty, and the other thirteen get drawn one per release rather than stamped out of a shared template. A template is exactly what would make them all the same thing, and then none of them would be worth reading.
This page is not going to show you one. The gallery already keeps a drawing’s name back until you have earned it, on the grounds that the picture is the reward, and an award is the same argument with the volume up. So here is the wall as everybody first finds it. It gives nothing away, on account of having nothing on it.
What it does not have
Most of this is a decision rather than a gap, and the two are very much worth telling apart. The gaps come next.
Nothing it asks you for
- No account. Nothing to sign up for, and nobody to be.
- No network calls. Not one. It works on a plane, in a tunnel, and in the corner of the house where nothing else does.
- No analytics. Nothing is counted anywhere but on your own phone.
- No permissions. The Android manifest asks for none. It is a very short file.
Nothing it sells you
- No ads. Not between puzzles, not for a hint, not at all.
- No paid coins and no lives. Tokens are earned only by solving puzzles, never topped up with real cash.
- No hint bundles. In other games, hints are sold to get you past unfair boards. Here, assistance is earned through play and every board is solvable without it.
- No subscription. One purchase, once, is the intended shape. It is not built yet, so for the moment the price is nothing.
Privacy
No accounts, no analytics, and no remote storage. What you solve stays on your phone.
Nonobonanza collects no personal data. There are no accounts, no ads, no trackers, and no third-party analytics. The app makes no network calls of any kind, so nothing you do ever leaves your phone.
Your solved drawings, earned awards, settings, and token balance live entirely in local storage on your device. Deleting the app removes them.
The controller for privacy inquiries is JCubed Lab, based in the Netherlands. The full document for store listings and data protection inquiries is published on the privacy policy page.
Not quite yet
Coming soon has covered a multitude of sins over the years, so here is what it means this time. The game itself is finished and it is a nice thing to sit with. What is not written yet is any way to pay for it, a daily nudge, a button to share a finished picture, and a screen of numbers about how you are getting on.
The same list lives in the repository’s README, where it is longer and less flattering, and a thing comes off it the day it ships rather than the day it is nearly done. That is the only habit that keeps such a list worth reading.
If you would like to hear when it lands, say so and I will tell you. Nothing else will arrive.